


Something I've Wanted All Along

by A_Diamond



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Dom/sub Undertones, M/M, Misunderstandings, Pack Feels, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-15
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2019-04-22 23:49:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14319774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Diamond/pseuds/A_Diamond
Summary: Stiles is jealous of all the time Derek spends training with the betas. It's not just that he wishes he could be part of the pack and worries that he's losing his best friend; he also envies the way they get Derek's hands all over them and he doesn't.





	Something I've Wanted All Along

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stiles24ontop](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=stiles24ontop).



> Sorry this is a few days late! I hope it satisfies what you were looking for.
> 
> Thanks as always to superhoney for the beta and encouragement <3

It was a dark and stormy night.

No, really; it _was_.

It was past ten and so rainy that Stiles was pretty sure his underwear was soaked through, which was absolutely not his favorite feeling ever. His socks had definitely started squelching half a mile back, his flannel shirt was way too wet to do anything against the wind, and he’d long since given up on keeping endless streams of water from running into his eyes. And all that was to say nothing about the conditions of the Preserve itself, where the ground was so slick with wet leaves that he’d fallen twice and branches kept jumping out of the darkness to smack him in the face.

By the time he found the training spot du jour - du nuit? - where Derek and the betas were throwing each other around, he was sodden and grumpy in equal measure. It didn’t help that none of the superhuman werewolves, with all their exceptional heightened senses and supposed situational awareness from all that damn training they were doing all the time, even seemed to pick up on his arrival. They just kept on launching themselves at Derek, who stood his ground without hitting back and growled out commands or corrections.

Stiles watched for however long it took the vague shapes he thought were Isaac and Jackson to fail to break through Derek’s guard a second time, then gave up on waiting to be noticed.

“I totally could’ve shot all of you with wolfsbane bullets by now,” he yelled to the group. On any other day he wouldn’t have felt the need to raise his voice, but being ignored grated on him and seeing the Scott-shape trip in surprise in the middle of rushing the center of the clearing eased his irritation a little.

“Stiles!” Scott hollered from the forest floor a few yards away. Seconds later, he was right in front of Stiles. “What are you doing here?”

“I found out some kinda crucial stuff about the marks on the trees near the house. Like, life or death stuff. But apparently none of you geniuses thought to bring your phones into the forest that an unknown force is trying to _drain the life out of_.”

Scott was close enough for Stiles to make out the sheepish expression on his face, but much more noticeable despite the distance was the red flash of Derek’s eyes.

“They’re doing what?” he demanded. No ‘sorry for being unreachable in a crisis’ or ‘thanks for braving a typhoon to tell us’ or even ‘hi, Stiles, you look cold.’

He knew he had to look cold because he fucking _was_.

“Yeah. Who- or whatever carved up those trees is siphoning energy out of them. When they’re drained dead, it’ll start pulling from the trees nearby, and all the little plants in between, and whatever, I don’t know, bunny rabbits are living in their little bunny holes, and it’ll go faster as it gets stronger, the spell feeds on itself, so it’s only a matter of time before it’s up to _eating werewolves._ ”

“So how do we stop it?” asked Scott, with the obvious and impossible questions as always.

Sighing, Stiles squished a hand through his hair; it wasn’t quite as satisfying when his hair felt like a soggy mop instead of a soft brush, but it got his frustration across anyway, he thought. “Wish I could tell you, Scott. But until we figure it out, how about we all stay out of the carnivorous forest?”

Though Scott agreed instantly and even put an arm around his shoulders—an offer of warmth and guidance that he was all too happy to accept—the others all hesitated, deferring to Derek. Of course they did. Stiles didn’t bother waiting. If they wanted to die, if _Derek_ wanted to let them die, at least he’d done his part.

He started trekking back the way he’d come and tried to pretend he wasn’t listening for the rustle of the rest of the pack following them.

  


After a very miserable drive home and a less miserable hot shower and a reasonably miserable hour of fruitless research, he was startled out of a _much needed_ doze by... something. Narrowing down the source didn’t take long: he’d locked his window for a reason. Derek crouched on the other side, looking soaked and apologetic but not miserable enough to mollify Stiles yet.

He pointedly turned back to his computer.

Fifteen minutes later, he looked over and Derek was still there. He watched the rain drench him for another minute or two, but finally relented under Derek’s steadfast and slightly pitiful stare. Opening the window, he threw the still-damp towel from his shower at Derek’s face before he even made it past the sill.

“I haven’t found anything else yet.”

“I know,” Derek said, voice muffled by the towel. Then, pushing it up and rubbing it through his hair, he clarified, “I mean, that’s not why I’m here.”

Stiles crossed his arms and did his best to look skeptical. “Uh huh. And why are you here, then, if not to either bask in or disparage my scholarship?”

“Because you were right. You should have been able to reach us, should always be able to reach someone else in the pack. I’m sorry.”

He looked so wet and bedraggled and... sincere, his eyes never leaving Stiles’s, that Stiles couldn’t hold on to the last of his anger. It had always been more frustration than rage, anyway, and maybe just a little jealousy.

Of the whole pack bonding thing, a little. He didn’t want to actually _be a werewolf_ , jesus, no. But being human didn’t make him useless, and he’d proven that often enough that he should’ve merited an invite to training sometimes, even if it was just to observe and critique.

And...

Okay, yeah, there was something else. Something he didn’t plan to share with anyone and tried not to think about, especially when Derek was in his room looking at him all earnestly, but that kind of made it the hardest time to avoid it. The pack settling in and learning to work together was great. Derek being something closer to well-adjusted, looking less like he was trying and failing to brace for the inevitable loss of everything he held dear—also great. Fucking fantastic, really, he was unsarcastically thrilled for the guy.

But it had been over a year since Derek had growled and thrown him into anything, and the betas got it like twice a week and didn’t even _like_ it.

That on top of Derek’s probably unintentional revelation that he preferred Stiles to call anyone but him— _someone else in the pack_ —left him a little snippy, even if he wasn’t mad. So in the face of Derek’s sincere apology, he raised his eyebrows, widened his eyes, and asked, “Did it hurt you to admit that?”

“No.” Derek looked at him evenly, taking the sting out of his snark by acting like it wasn’t there. Then he ruined it further by smiling a small smile and ducking out the window without another word.

And also without returning Stiles’s towel.

“On second thought, I don’t want to talk to your pack anymore!” he called out into the night, assuming Derek was still somewhere to hear it. “You don’t steal a man’s towel!”

  


The next day was a Sunday, so Stiles could catch up on the sleep he’d lost to supernatural drama. At least, that was the plan until the heel of his dad’s hand pounded ruthlessly on his door at... he glared, bleary-eyed, at the clock. Six a.m. was a bullshit time any day of the week, but it shouldn’t have even been allowed to exist on a Sunday.

“Get up!” his dad hollered, because apparently the ruthlessly loud noise wasn’t punishment enough for whatever terrible crime he must have committed. “If your friends are going to wake me up at ass o’clock in the morning on my _one day off_ , there is no way in hell that you get to sleep through it.”

“What?” Stiles muttered, then, “Friends?”

“I know, I was surprised too. But apparently you have them!” With that rude joke, he flung open the door and stood back to let Erica and Isaac in. He raised an eyebrow at the sight of both of them climbing onto his son’s bed, but Stiles had a tshirt on and a blanket covering the rest, and they didn’t do anything but sit on the edge to shake and poke him annoyingly.

“Get up,” Erica commanded. “Come on, we’ll be late.”

Uselessly flailing his arms to fend them off, he asked, “Late for what?”

“Pack breakfast,” said Isaac.

There was the pang of hurt again, same as the night before, and harder to smother when he was only half awake. So his bitterness was on full display when he snapped, “I’m not your fucking chauffeur, get your own furry asses to _pack breakfast._ Since when do you have pack breakfasts?”

Of course he hadn’t known or been invited. But also, it fucking sucked. He thought Scott, at least, would’ve cared enough to tip him off. Feeling like he was losing his best friend to the pack he wanted to be part of and never would: also not great.

Erica blew out an impatient breath and grabbed one of his defensively raised arms to drag him off the bed. She was strong enough to do it, and she was hot and wearing a leather jacket. It still wasn’t the same as when Derek used to manhandle him.

“Since today,” Erica said once he was mostly upright. “This is the first one. And you’re driving, so get dressed.”

Arguing with her—with both of them, giving him looks that said they could and would clothe him by force while his dad ignored his cries for help—didn’t seem like a particularly fun use of time, so he settled for grumbling unhappily as he did what they wanted. At least their stupid werewolf ears would hear every complaint he had on the topic.

  


He didn’t expect to be ordered to Derek’s loft, because Isaac _lived there_ so there was no reason for him to need a ride, but maybe he’d been at Erica’s or something. He didn’t expect them to drag him in with them, because it was a _pack_ breakfast, but he wouldn’t refuse some waffles for his trouble after the morning’s rude awakening.

He did not expect _Derek Hale_ frying _sausages_ with his sleeves rolled up and a soft-looking gray apron clinging to his chest, because—because. Just because. It wasn’t a reasonable thing for anyone to have expected, an opinion that Scott’s baffled stare vindicated. Even Boyd looked as skeptical as he’d ever managed, and Jackson seemed weirdly insecure about it beneath the cover of hostility at being forced to grace them with his presence.

Derek was making breakfast. Breakfast sausage, and Stiles had to actively work against all the innuendo that wanted to pop up about finally getting his mouth around Derek’s sausage. He didn’t say it and he tried not to think about it; that way lay madness.

Though spending twenty minutes staring at Derek’s forearms as he flipped pancakes and breakfast meats wasn’t necessarily good for his mental health, either. He only realized he’d been doing it when Derek turned away from the stove and he had to quickly look away, but fortunately it didn’t look like anyone had noticed; they were all otherwise engaged. Scott, Erica, and Isaac were clustered in a group to look at something on Isaac’s phone, Jackson was hunched over his own phone, and Boyd was reading a book with an occasional glance over to the larger group.

No one was paying attention to him.

Except Derek.

He set the plate he’d just filled right in front of Stiles then sat across from him, watching with the same open but serious expression he’d worn in Stiles’s room. It was almost as weird as the breakfast-making, but when Stiles looked around to confirm that weirdness with anyone else, they were all still occupied. Very pointedly. He blamed his exhaustion for not catching the absurdly overt setup earlier.

Derek waited for Stiles to meet his eyes again and said, apropos of absolutely nothing, “Our pack.”

“Huh?”

“Last night, you called it my pack.” So he had heard. “You said ‘your pack’, not ‘my pack’ or ‘our pack’. Stiles, this whole time. Do you really not know? You are—you’ve always been.”

“Huh,” Stiles said again, but that time it was more as a way to buy time and process. He did all his best thinking with his mouth moving, which was part of the reason he usually talked an amount that some people classified as _too much_. For once he was actually pretty sure he knew what Derek was trying to say, but that didn’t mean he didn’t need a minute with the idea.

He had maybe been interpreting a few things wrong for a few years, including the latest: that he should call ‘someone else in the pack.’ Derek hadn’t meant someone other than _himself_ , he’d meant someone other than Stiles. And it was true that no one had ever batted an eye at Stiles showing up to meetings with Scott, but they really only had meetings when something was actively going wrong, so he’d assumed that it was just because he was useful for strategy.

After all, the wolfy training sessions happened a lot more regularly, and he’d never been involved in those. Which was the reasonable, evidence-based point he was trying to make when the words he actually said came out not quite that way. “But you never throw me around.”

As soon as he caught on to what he’d said and how Derek’s eyebrows had shot up, he stammered, “I mean, uh, not that I want you to—” which was a mistake in a room full of heartbeat-reading lie detectors.

He didn’t know if Scott’s choking noise was one of laughter or horror, but Erica was obviously amused when she said, “I told you Stilinski was thirsty.”

Stiles kind of wanted to curl up and die, but Derek’s hand stopped his forehead before it could hit the table. “I didn’t think you wanted to train with the rest of them,” Derek said softly. “Scott started coming and you didn’t, I thought... It doesn’t matter. I should have asked. You’d be good to keep us on our toes.”

Forcing himself out of his embarrassed hunch, Stiles looked up—past his ridiculously high stack of pancakes—and saw nothing but sincerity in Derek’s face. He waited for the other shoe to drop, but nothing happened; no more mocking from the pack, no comment from Derek on what he’d given away. Until he finally relaxed, smiling a little, and said, “Yeah, okay.”

That’s when Derek hit him with, “But if it’s okay with you, I think I’d prefer to keep the throwing you around in private.”

Yeah, that was pretty okay with him.


End file.
